Aspects and embodiments of the invention pertain to nanostructured, plasmonic-enabled, liquid crystal (LC) display apparatus and methods, and more particularly to a voltage-controlled liquid crystal-plasmonic display apparatus, methods, and applications, that cover the full RGB color basis set with a single nanostructure of singular dimensions.
Structural color arising from plasmonic nanomaterials and surfaces has received ever increasing attention. The drive to commercialize these systems has led to significant improvements in color quality, angle independence, brightness, and post-fabrication tunability. However, while most of these advances struggle to replace present commercially available technologies, the ability to change color, post-fabrication, is a distinct advantage of plasmonic systems, which may allow them to advantageously fill niche applications. For example, traditional transmissive and reflective displays typically have three sub-pixel regions with static red, green and blue color filters. These sub-pixels control the amount of each basis color transmitted or absorbed to create arbitrary colors through a process called color mixing.
A display built from a dynamic color-changing surface can eliminate the need for individual sub-pixels, increasing resolution by 3× without reducing pixel dimensions. However, previous reports of post-fabrication plasmonic tuning have yet to span an entire color basis set (RGB or CYM) with a single nanostructure.
In Applicant's previous work (described in PCT/US2015/056373), a nanostructured, plasmonic-enabled, color generation apparatus is disclosed that could only span two of the three RGB values for a single nanostructure. In order to cover the entire color set, multiple nanostructures were required.